Another Masefield Tragedy
The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, by John Masefield. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author’s special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield’s plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far as his contemporaries are concerned.
Masefield’s great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are themselves tragical. Life is full of and inseparable from tragedy. Pompey “saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun. He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds, to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man’s fire.” The old warrior lies awake, thinking. “What are we?” he asks Lucceius, and that actor in a great play replies, “Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an end.” Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the heart of the present and exclaims, “Tragedy!” And of course that is in his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer desperation he endues dust with a “tragic purpose,” but he does not believe so much as he hopes that a “purpose” inheres in that resultant of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of Pompey he says:
And all their passionate hearts are dust,
And dust the great idea that burned
In various flames of love and lust
Till the world’s brain was turned.
God, moving darkly in men’s brains,
Using their passions as his tool,
Brings freedom with a tyrant’s chains
And wisdom with the fool.
Blindly and bloodily we drift,
Our interests clog our hearts with dreams,
God make my brooding soul a rift
Through which a meaning gleams.
The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, unlike any Shaw play or even The Tragedy of Nan, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one’s soul.
What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. “Caesar would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn’t backed him.” But that tyrant’s lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was “a blind, turbulent heaving towards freedom.” Pompey’s dream of freedom—his conviction that power was in too few hands—cost him his life. To him Rome was inwardly “a great democratic power struggling with obsolete laws.” He declared that “Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more power.” But Pompey’s dream was shallow and human, even if great, for, regarding the “thought of the world” as of transcendent importance, he asks, “For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the world? What else matters?”
History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were losing Rome, said to Pompey, “You have done nothing.” The reply—“Wait”—has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar, but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, “but at once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time here. The rabble don’t hesitate. They don’t understand a man who hesitates.”
That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting to speak for the crowd.
Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his master, whom he would follow “To the desert. To the night without stars. To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame.” To him this blind devotion meant more than Antistia’s love. “We shall have to put off our marriage,” he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the mother, unachieved, answered:
Why, thus it is. We put off and put off till youth’s gone, and strength’s gone, and beauty’s gone. Till we two dry sticks mumble by the fire together, wondering what there was in life, when the sap ran.... When you kiss the dry old hag, Philip, you’ll remember these arms that lay wide on the bed, waiting, empty. Years. You’ll remember this beauty. All this beauty. That would have borne you sons but for your master.
Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia’s was the supreme tragedy.
DeWitt C. Wing.